Palmer Graduates in School of Hard Knocks

Tom Palmer is different from those first-time English visitors with their noses pressed to the windows of the team bus. Like his captain Martin Johnson, who once played for New Zealand Colts, he knows how it feels to wear the fabled silver fern at representative level.

As a teenager the 6ft 6in inch lock swapped Boroughmuir High School in Edinburgh - his father's job had taken the family north of the border - for Dunedin where he spent a couple of years and won selection for New Zealand schoolboys, making a sufficient impression to be asked to stay on.

Among those alongside him in that junior All Black pack were Carl Hayman, the huge Otago prop who now features in the Maori squad that takes on England here on Monday, and the wrecking ball flanker Jerry Collins, who has recently made the full New Zealand squad. He also played for the South Island alongside Aaron Mauger and Sam Harding and earned his schoolboy cap against Wales at Eden Park, prior to a New Zealand-South Africa Tri-Nations Test.

"They were quite keen for me to stay on and attend university but it came about a week before I was due to go home and I'd made my mind up," he says a shade wistfully.

No rugby education is complete without a trip to New Zealand. Even players not destined for the Test arena should go once to learn what true rugby passion is all about, which is why England's opening game on Monday is no midweek jaunt. Anyone who stands firm against the NZ Maori will be graduating from the ultimate school of hard knocks.

It is just as well, then, that England are not heading for New Plymouth with a callow bunch of innocents but a squad of driven young men aware this could be their only chance to convince Clive Woodward they deserve a World Cup ticket.

Even outside bets like the Leeds second-row forward can scent the whiff of opportunity on this short England tour. "When you get these chances you've got to try and take them," says Palmer, who sits on the bench on Monday. "If I get on for 20 minutes against the Maoris I'm going to make sure they're 20 good minutes."

The 23-year-old Palmer, a late addition to the squad after Danny Grewcock's ban ruled him out of contention, also concedes another blunt truth: it is an awful long way to go for potentially just half a dozen lineouts. When the 1924-25 All Black "Invincibles" toured Europe they left Wellington on July 29 and returned almost eight months later on March 17. In contrast Palmer expects to be on another plane bound for Canada on Tuesday to boost England's Churchill Cup squad in Vancouver.

After his sojourn in New Zealand Palmer came back to read physics at Leeds University, represented Scotland at Under-21 level and then, despite pressure from Murrayfield, threw in his lot with England, the land of his birth, after a lengthy conversation with his Leeds director of rugby Phil Davies.

"I sat down with Phil and had a big chat about it. We weighed up the pros and cons and wrote them down on a bit of paper. When you do that there isn't very much choice." When he was capped on England's North American tour of 2001, before he had even played in the Premiership, the decision was vindicated but since then he has been playing a waiting game. While Johnson, Simon Shaw and Grewcock are all 30-something they are not stepping aside just yet.

So is the wonderfully athletic Palmer sanguine about all this? "I'm naturally very impatient. I've always wanted things to happen yesterday. But, if you want to play in the best team in the world, you've got to accept there are some good players there. I've got to be patient, I suppose, as well as making sure I keep working hard to try and better myself. I'm still fairly young and, if you look at a lot of the other players, they're all quite a lot older."

Had he stayed in New Zealand, of course, he might by now be competing for a place in the New Zealand front five, not the All Blacks' strongest area. Instead he is effectively sixth in the English pecking order, which emphasises the strength of Woodward's England.

As a student of Kiwi rugby, though, Palmer knows better than to imagine the Maori, with seven internationals including Christian Cullen and Taine Randell in their ranks, will lie down meekly and permit any English lock to make unopposed hay in Grewcock's absence.

"I'm sure it'll be a very hard game. They'll be very up for it because it's a chance for a lot of them to stake their claims and try and get into the All Black side for the Tri Nations."

As the legendary George Nepia, the star of those 1924 Invincibles, observed: "Maoris when they are excited giggle better than anybody." Will it be England and the determinedly pushy Palmer who enjoy the last laugh this time?